The Amazon Trail: Sexual Language

By
Lee Lynch
Published:
January 29, 2012

I didn’t like living with my father
growing up and can’t imagine sharing a home with someone so
essentially different from myself as an adult. I don’t think
there’s anything wrong with guys, and I feel much more akin to gay
male friends than to non-gay male friends. We’re just not
compatible. The energy, for me, is akin to two magnets turned the
wrong way – they very forcefully repel rather than attract.

Living with a woman feels much more
natural to me. There are no assumptions about roles. There are no
Mars-Venus issues.

I like traveling with a woman. I like
shopping with a woman. I like sleeping next to a woman, socializing
with women in person or virtually. I love writing about women and
having a woman publisher. I understand, mostly, our relationships
with one another. I’ve always said, as a symbol of my partiality to
female company, that men’s feet are too big. I trip over them. They
take up my space. I have no conversation for guys outside of work,
for example, or perhaps shared missions.

There are some words and phrases used
regularly in gay culture that disturb me. The worst is “sexual
preference.” It’s so limiting!

Is this the best message to describe
ourselves and to give to outsiders? In my experience, I have a gender
preference as well as a sexual preference. Simply put, and although I
enjoy male friends and relatives, I prefer the company of women. No
matter what we’re doing together, whether it’s affectional,
sexual or conversational.

Heterosexuals are viewed as whole
people. They don’t walk around with labels like lesbian or queer or
gay. No one meets a non-gay person and immediately thinks of what
they do in bed or with whom. At least I hope not. Yet when I meet a
straight for the first time, I know I’m sometimes being viewed
one-dimensionally. I’m tipped off by their questions, by their
references to gay people they know, by their excited – or
grossed-out – expressions. This may never change, but I don’t
have to perpetuate that tunnel vision with my own speech.

Usage of the word gay gets my goat too.
Since when is gay applied only to men? I’ve been gay since I was
15. And, frankly, it was a little easier to think of myself as gay
than as homosexual or lesbian when I first came out. Both of those
words were fraught with centuries of negative baggage. Today, I’d
rather be a dyke or queer than a lesbian, but I always want to be
gay. I’m so happy gay, I’d rather have been born a gay man than a
straight woman. How to stop the journalists from using the phrase
“lesbians and gay men”? Can we say “gay people”? Or “gay
women and men”? It is nice when they lead with the female words;
we’ve come a long way since women weren’t even newsworthy. Now
even gay women are included in mainstream stories now and then.

While it’s true that, as a writer, I
may be oversensitive to words, language has always been a powerful
tool used for good and bad, to oppress or to free, to imprison in
stereotypes and to declare independence from them. One of the best
known objectionable words is “boy,” used to strip adulthood from
black men. Slang is often a weapon, as when bullies toss around words
like “fag” and “sissy.” The gay way of life is frequently
called “unhealthy.” What the heck does that mean? Unhealthy for
whom?

We can be lazy with language, using
shortcuts that become code words to signal disapproval. It’s hard
to watch what we say. The brilliant and brave Mary Daly was a
revolutionary of words, revealing their clout in our speech by
dissecting them. The very title of her book Gyn/Ecology (1988) plays
with a deeper meaning. Daly’s presentation of such words as
“a-maz-ing" opened my eyes to what I am really talking about.
I think of the term “stag-nation," as she explains it in
Wickedary (1987).

It may sound like I am griping and need
to quit sweating the small stuff. In actuality, I am protesting the
misconstruction of our words, misconstruing of our lives and the
surrender of queers to labeling by outsiders and insiders. We take
back the night, we take up our cause. Now we need to take back our
words, because they are still being used against us.

[Editor's Note: Lee Lynch is the author
of over 12 books. Her latest, Beggar
of Love, was called “Lee
Lynch's richest and most candid portrayals of lesbian life” by
Katherine V. Forrest. You can reach Lynch at
LeeLynch@ontopmag.com]